One of Those Days
by K. Elisabeth
Summary: Everyone has those days where nothing goes right and everything you do blows up in your face. Brennan is pretty sure today couldn't get any worse... or could it? A humorous oneshot about one of those days.


_It's 'bout as bad as it could be  
Seems everybody's buggin' me  
Like nothing wants to go my way,  
Yeah, it just ain't been my day  
Nothin's comin' easily..._

_- Up!, Shania Twain  
_

* * *

Brennan rolled over in bed, pressing her face into the pillow and sighing. The sun filtered in through the curtains, sounds of the street below muted through the glass. The sheets were wrapped tightly around her from a night of tossing and turning, and she pulled her knees up to her chest and groaned. A long-winded party on the floor above hers had kept her up most of the night, staring up into the darkness and crossing her fingers for a power outage. No such luck. Who partied on Sunday night anyway?

Sunday. Sunday was yesterday. That meant today was Monday.

She swore aloud, looking over at her clock and realizing it was eight forty-five—approximately fifteen minutes until she was expected at the lab. Whether she had forgotten to set her alarm or it didn't go off, she didn't really have time to wonder.

She tried to jump out of bed, but the tangle of sheets bound her like a mummy. She thrashed violently until her limbs were free, rolling over the side of the mattress and giving herself a moment to stretch before heading into the bathroom to shower. She shed her clothes on the floor piece by piece until she was standing bare in the room, waiting for the water to heat up.

Figuring she didn't have time to wait, she hopped into the stand-up shower, goosebumps covering her skin. She inhaled sharply in response to the cold and stepped back, wrapping her arms around her exposed body and gritting her teeth. She hesitantly stepped back under the showerhead, soaking her hair and lathering it with shampoo. She stood with suds in her hair for several minutes on the far edge of the shower stall before she realized that the water was honestly not going to heat up. Was the hot water out in the building? Given the absolute frigidness of her shower, she had to assume so.

She sped through the rest of her cold shower, deciding to wear pants and forgo shaving this particular morning. She snuggled into her robe and wrapped her wet hair in a towel, rifling through her closet for a pair of slacks. Jeans, sweat pants, more jeans—where were her plain black pants? She must have had three or four pairs, but she couldn't find any of them that morning. She looked at the overflowing dirty clothes hamper across the room and sighed. That would explain the lack of clothes.

_My legs can't be that hairy_, she thought to herself, selecting a black skirt and a blouse to go with it. If they were, to hell with it—nobody would be touching her legs today anyway. She stared down at them as she was about to step into the skirt and had second thoughts—even from a distance it looked like slash-and-burn agriculture had been abandoned in the area, and the wilderness was attempting to reclaim its territory. She cussed loudly and threw the skirt on her bed, upturning her dirty clothes hamper on the floor and rooting around in the mess until she found a wrinkled pair of black slacks. She looked left to right, as if expecting someone to be observing her actions, then tentatively sniffed one of the pant legs. Satisfied, she pulled them on and hoped that the wrinkles would fall out during the course of the day.

Buttoning her blouse she entered the kitchen, thinking it prudent to eat a quick breakfast before leaving. She had no food at the lab, not even a snack, and she probably wouldn't have time to break for lunch until late in the day. If she didn't eat something now, she would regret it later. She instinctively reached for the bag of English muffins that usually sat on her counter, but found her fingers groping around in an empty space. Now she remembered eating the last one around two-thirty that morning, bitterly wishing her upstairs neighbors would get laid off and have to move. Frustrated, she opened the fridge in hopes of grabbing a yogurt and maybe some fruit.

_Where did my food go?_ Brennan thought, bewildered, as she scanned the vast wasteland that her refrigerator had become. She almost always had something edible on hand, but this morning all that was visible was a small amount of milk, an unopened jar of relish, and half a bottle of soy sauce. The past few weeks had been so hectic, with case after case piling up, that she hadn't had time to grocery shop. Since she and Booth almost always ate out after work anyway, real food had been a non-issue. As long as she had breakfast stuffs, she'd be alright. Now the breakfast food was gone and all she had left was an extremely unsavory combination of condiments.

She withdrew the jug of milk and tore the pantry apart until she found what she thought she had hidden in the far back of the shelf—a box of Fruit Loops she had bought to feed Parker when she kept him one afternoon several weeks prior. It had been a terrifying experience, made more so by the foods she was subjected to by the small boy. She checked the date, a mildly horrific several years into the future, and decided that while under normal circumstances she would not eat food that could feasibly outlive her, today was about survival. She emptied the stale multicolored loops into a bowl and poured the last of the remaining milk on top of them. The milk barely covered a third of the contents of the bowl, so she was now faced with the predicament of having too much cereal and not enough milk for it.

Brennan snatched a spoon out of the drawer and took her cereal to the table, where she threw herself down into the chair and huffed angrily. The chair, she had forgotten until that precise moment, that was slightly shorter in one of the back legs so that it wobbled when anyone sat in it. She wobbled, and the bowl of cereal wobbled with her, splashing the front of her blouse with milk.

She let out the ungodly sort of noise usually reserved for slain beasts and war casualties, overcome by the thirty minutes of non-stop aggravation. She nearly tore the buttons off of her shirt as she undid them, balling up the wet blouse and tossing it across the room. The throw was unproductive and it landed flat about six feet from where she sat, but she didn't care. She stubbornly stabbed at her Fruit Loops, trying to soak as many of them as possible in the small amount of milk she had left.

They were so stale. So, so stale. The kind of stale even goats and starving third-world children could not stomach. They squealed between her teeth but refused to crunch as she chewed with gusto, determined to swallow at least a few bites to quell the stabbing hunger pains in her stomach. At this rate, she might rather starve.

It was at that moment that her doorbell rang, and she growled audibly. If it was the downstairs neighbor coming to yell at _her _again for the party above her, she felt like she might be inclined to clobber them with something heavy. As she headed towards the door she caught her pinkie toe on the corner of her couch, and howled as she felt it crunch. Hopping on one foot and rubbing the offended toe with her fingers, she decided that it was official—this day could not possibly get any worse.

She thought that, anyway, until she unhooked the chain and threw the door open stormily, only to find Booth standing on the other side of it.

Her shirt was still in a heap on the floor behind her.

Okay, so the day could get a little bit worse. His eyes shot straight down to her lacy black bra, then piously up to the ceiling as his face flushed deep pink.

"Oh," was all he could say, trying very hard not to smile. She thought if he did, she would have to take his gun and shoot him in the kneecap with it. "I didn't… uh… you didn't pick up… er… well, your phone, and… huh… well… I'm just gonna go wait in the car now." He turned on his heel and walked swiftly down the hall, and it was only once he had turned the corner that she heard him dissolve into a fit of laughter.

She slammed the door, face burning brightly, but for some reason unable to stop the wry smile that had touched her lips. At least now she knew the day_ had _to improve; it certainly couldn't get any worse.


End file.
